Someone very dear to me was rushed to the emergency room three Sundays ago and found to be dying. My wife and I drove out to be with my sister and have sat for hours in her room on the cancer ward. We’ve watched Spongebob Squarepants with her, listened with her to the professionally cheerful nurses and the slightly evasive doctor, paced the hallway when she had to suffer the more undignified parts of being cared for. We brought her home on Saturday and settled her in.

This has made me angrier than perhaps anything else in my entire life. I’ve said things to the cosmos involving various forms of the worst word you can think of. She does not deserve this. Later, okay, but not now, not for years.

At the Church

On Palm Sunday morning we decided to go to the church nearest our hotel, on the sole grounds that it was an old building that might still be beautiful, while the church around the corner from our friend’s home was modern and likely not to be beautiful. The choice was essentially random. I was still angry, but we are supposed to get ourselves to church on Sundays, and I always found worship comforting, so off we went.

It was an inner-city church, and as beautiful as we’d hoped. The immigrants who built it a hundred years ago did well.

It had a congregation of academics and artists and people stereotypical for this hip northeastern city — the kind of city that remembers the ’60s and has a brewpub every two blocks — like the old man with a long ponytail next to us and the woman in the flowing madras peasant dress next to him. Bernie Sanders buttons were to be seen. The congregation included a lot of Africans, with the women dressed in bright beautiful African dresses, their husbands stylishly dressed and their sons with dreadlocks.

It was a gift, being there. I had grown up in a New England college town, and this church and its people reminded me a lot of my hometown and the Catholic church there, St. Brigid’s. These were my people. I felt instantly at home.

The Mass was simple, informal but reverent. The peace (the shared greeting just before the Communion) went on a bit, with people going out of their way to stretch across the pews to share it with us. In his homily the priest offered a striking biblical insight and a moving quote on mercy from Pope Francis, and useful instruction on living like Christ. I tried to sing but every time started to break down, but as Mass went on I felt the universe right itself.

And then came Communion, which the Catholic believes is an actual, physical encounter with Jesus Christ. He was there waiting for me, however I happened to be feeling at the moment. He knew from personal experience what it is to suffer.

I left the church feeling happy, though still angry at the cosmos. I felt “D**n the cosmos all to hell” and (with Julian of Norwich) “All manner of things shall be well.”

At the Pub

A couple nights later, I went to get dinner at a small pub near my friend’s home. My sister had fallen asleep for the night and was not the sort to have much to eat in her cupboard. I was sitting at the end of the bar with my laptop, ignored in a friendly way by the people nearby, when a roughly 60-year-old guy, dressed in old New England preppie style and wearing a Red Sox cap, sat next to me and started talking to the bartender. They were obviously friends.

Guy: “I’m looking forward to Sunday.”
Bartender: “Why?”
Guy: “It’s Easter.”
Woman two people down the bar: “Yeah. Of course it’s Easter.”
Guy: “Gave up beer for Lent. [Laughs.] Don’t know what I was thinking.”
Bartender: “Geez, man.”
Guy: “Yeah. [Pause, then regretfully] I like beer.”

The bartender shook his head. The woman two people down the bar laughed. The rest of us looked sympathetic.

This was also a gift. His was a small witness shared with a friend and the temporary friends you meet in a townie pub. It was more humorous than pious. But it was a witness, and one shared with others as you would share any other basic fact of life. It was not “religious,” the kind of thing that feels as if you ought to preface it with “And now, ladies and gentlemen, a word from God” as the spotlight switches on.

It was his life, and he shared part of it with friends and strangers. That was good to see.

Small Signs

The gift of a church that felt like home, and the amusing witness of a man in a bar, those for me are small signs that my sister’s sudden illness does not give the final word about the cosmos or man, that God is at work in his own way accomplishing his ends.

My secular friends would say that I’m clutching at straws, and I admit these are not pillar of fire-type signs. They would say going to that particular church was just luck and the guy in the bar someone just as deluded as I am.

But they’re not signs for me because they tell me something I didn’t know. They are signs because they reminded me of something I already knew but could not feel, faced with the massive unfairness of my sister’s terminal illness: that God became one of us and suffered death too, and remains with us and comes to us in the Sacrament, that he makes the Church a home for his people and gives us to each other as friends. I am still angry, let me be clear, but not as angry as I was.

This is a revised version of an article that appeared last week on the Catholic website Aleteia, for which David writes a weekly column. For another article on facing loss as Christians, see his “On Easter Monday, We’re Back on Holy Saturday.” Follow him on Twitter @DavidMillsWrtng.